Daily Archives: November 14, 2009

Open Source

I won it! You guys are the best.

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I am happy and very proud to mention that I was just this evening awarded the Nordic Free Software Award 2009 and I share the award with my good friend and hacker extraordinaire Simon Josefsson.

Thank you jury. Thank you mates all over who by your positive feedback makes it a joy to work in the open source and free software community. Thank you to all you fellow hackers and contributors who work hard and tirelessly and therefore enable me to do what I want to do and do these things I today got awarded for.

Getting recognition from actual fellow peers within my own community is just the best.

And you know what? I will continue to work hard and I will continue to do open source and free software intensively and with my strengthened beliefs of what I think is right.

Thank you.

The motivation quoted from the above mentioned site:

The other winner is awarded for his long term contributions to free software.This winner have been developing free software for at least 15 years, and is a prominent contributor to at least 10 different projects.

This winners most spread contribution is the program Curl and the library libCurl which both has an enormous installed base. Libcurl has bindings in more than 40 different languages and they are both deployed all over the world as a key components in software that people and businesses rely on every day. In addition to these projects the winner is also a key developer in Rockbox, c-ares and libssh2.

IT Politics, Linux, Open Source

The Swedish BankID curse and Debian

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Lots of bank, tax and insurance related stuff in Sweden these days switch to using BankID for secure logins on web sites.

That system used to be a java-thing so as long as your browser supported running java applets, you’d be fine. Even us strange guys who prefer Linux. While I’m not a huge fan of java, this seemed to be a rather fine example of where using a java-applet was actually a pretty good idea to achieve functionality on a wide variety of platforms without too much work.

They ditched the java applet a while ago and switched to a browser plugin and native application instead, which then suddenly made them forced to write platform-specific code to achieve the same magic. And not too surprisingly, the Linux version was poorly made and is not supported and is left with a really complicated way to install it which no doubt will prevent every Linux-newbie out there from using BankID on Linux. Annoying and rude if you ask me.

Now, my bank (Skandiabanken) is about to switch to use BankID completely for their regular logins and I thought it was about time for me to start the fight with this under Linux and see what I will learn.

The install.sh script is written for Ubuntu (very poorly) and doesn’t work. Shame on you Nexus for that crap. I poked it and with some manual hands-on I could install the stuff properly. I can now head over to the official BankID site and it verifies that my installation works fine. Somehow it does however not allow me to “sign” anything because of some failure and here’s the “fun” part:

The only help and contact there is about BankID says “contact your bank” for support. My bank says they have no support and just drops the ball there.

I’m willing to offer my fixed version of the install script that will work better on more distros. I’m willing to work a bit on my own to fix this for Linux uses such as myself. But how the hack can I even fix the problems when nobody can answer any questions or provide any details on this system?